The Long Way Home: Portraits of the Highway Walkers of India

On a recent family road trip between Delhi and Maharashtra, National Geographic photographer Mathieu Paley noticed a man walking on the highway. He couldn’t stop at the time, but the next time he spotted a pedestrian, he drove into the exit lane, asked his family to wait, and stepped out to investigate. The walker, Binod Yasin, had no bag and no water that hot day, and was wearing loads of blankets and two completely different shoes, but he almost seemed liberated by being on the road. When Paley asked him how he had both a Hindu name and a Muslim name, he answered, “Does it matter? We are all under one” before moving on. Paley was hooked.

For the next three months that Paley spent on the road with his wife and two sons, he often pulled over their converted camping car to lend an ear, take a picture, or pass on a bottle of water. Some “were like walking ghosts,” he wrote on Nat Geo’s online photo journal Proof, “No one seemed to notice them.” The encounters may have been brief but, as Paley’s Instagram photos show below, they were lasting nonetheless.